I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to make your YouTube videos look better. You may not know this but you can actually upload your own photos for the thumbnails on YouTube. This is especially important if you are embedding them onto your blog or in a course and you want to grab people’s attention to click them and watch them. Youtube always picks the worst pictures of me and its quality stinks. Even though they give you three images to pick from, I usually don’t like any of them.

It’s very easy to make your own especially now if you have Adobe Spark to do this. As you may have read recently, it’s now become one of our favorite design platforms for social media. And the best part, it’s free!

How to Create Thumbnails For YouTube Videos

Step 1:

Go to spark.adobe.com and register. Look for themes and color palettes you like. Go to resize and find the YouTube thumbnail size. The reason I love Adobe Spark is because it’s so easy to change sizes for all of the social media platforms we post to.

Step 2:

Take a screenshot of the Youtube video or find another photo you like for the background. Then, upload the photo. Change the text to the title of your video. Click share and download to your computer.

Note: When you first start on Adobe Spark, you do need to share this on social media once publicly to get rid of the Adobe Spark logo. After you share it one time, you no longer have their logo on your photos.

Step 3:

Upload the thumbnail to the video while you are in editing mode on YouTube. There is also an option to do this when you upload a video the first time.

Click save and then your new YouTube thumbnail should be live!